Chasing the scent of Love, Truth, Beauty, and Mirth, wherever it may lead.

Thursday, January 08, 2015

Non-Traditional Casting

Can a
White Man Play Nat Turner?

Back in the mid-1980s, when I landed
my first living-wage job as an ensemble actor at the venerable Fulton Opera
House in Lancaster, PA, non-traditional casting, as it was
called, was encouraged in professional theater. There was an Asian-American in
our company, for instance, who played parts written for Caucasians, and I
myself played an Asian buffoon in one of the productions.

Later, as a director myself, I cast
African-American actors in a variety of non-traditional roles. Among other
considerations—like availability and talent—I stood behind the policy of making
more choice roles available to good actors who didn't happen to be white.

But something I never considered
before last weekend is how rare it must be for a white actor to be cast in a
role written for a black. In fact, without a background in non-traditional
casting, I might have shied away when Patti Wray called at 4:30 p.m. on Jan. 4 and asked me to play Nat Turner
in “Nat’s Last Struggle,” her one-man play scheduled for a staged reading
before a live audience at 7:30 that evening.

She’d had a black actor cast, but
she’d just found out that he was sick and couldn't make the gig.

How could I say no? Patti is my
friend, and she’s also my boss at The Venue on 35th in Norfolk, VA, where I’m artist-in-residence. I told her
to email the script to me. We joked about doing the role in black face.

The script came around 5 p.m. I printed it out and began reading. Though
I’d seen the play before—in fact, written a review of it in 2009 in Thinking
Dog Reviews—I remembered little about it or its protagonist except that George
Davis, the black actor who played Nat, turned in a
powerful performance.

I read the script through carefully
twice, making notes to myself in the spaces and margins. I dressed myself in
somber shades, ate a slice of Jala’s nutritious, freshly baked quiche, and we
set off for The American Theatre in Hampton, just across the water from
Norfolk, where the reading would be held.

We arrived around 6:45. Aside from artistic director Jeff Stern,
Patti and her Venue co-owner Lucy White, and Kaitlin Koch, the sound operator,
no one was there. I checked out the lecture room. Not many chairs were set up,
but not many people were expected. The Lighthouse Series, as
it’s called—this trial relationship between a well- appointed professional
touring house and a local playwrights’ group—had yet to draw much audience.

What chairs there were faced a
playing area along one wall of the room, where props were arranged at different
stations. The actor originally cast presumably knew when and how to use them,
but I didn't. I asked for a music stand to be placed center stage, giving me a
base from which I
could expand—or not—as the spirit moved me.

I got some notes on sound cues from
Kaitlin, then I sat down in a chair on the set and began reading through the
script again.

It was about 7:15 by then, and two or three people had
drifted in. As I read, still making notes, more people arrived. More chairs
were being set up, more people arriving, still more chairs. By the time we
started, not long after 7:30, the chairs had overflowed into the halls.
Most of the people, by far, were black, and some of them were looking at me
through furrows of doubt.

Jeff introduced the evening,
explaining, of course, what had happened with the original actor, though I
don’t think he ever actually uttered either the words “black” or “white.” For my
part—naively but fortunately, as it turned out—I saw no reason why I couldn't read the script
with sufficient conviction and authenticity.

The play begins with the prerecorded voice of a judge ordering Nat Turner to stand, which I did. My reading glasses in place, I moved
to the music stand to hear the judge sentence me—that is, Nat—to
be hanged by the neck until “dead, dead, dead.”

I've always had a fascination with
the whole process of execution. What would it be like, after committing some
heinous crime, to hear that sentence, absorb the finality of it? Of course any
of us could die at any time, and often do, but to know the date, the time, and
the method, then be led away to wait until they come for you, gives me a very
weird, primitive feeling of damnation and hell and longing for redemption. In
that sense a death sentence offers the opportunity to enter a sacred space where execution is transformational, the door to a delirious freedom.

I tapped into that emotion as I
absorbed Nat’s death sentence, and when I began to speak a voice I hadn't rehearsed and didn’t quite recognize in my repertory of voices boomed forth in
an accent I wasn’t sure I could control, and I launched into the play—an
approximately 40-minute monologue—feeling a bit like a white-water rafter
shooting forward through unpredictable rapids.

But my audience went with me, offering
an example of the validity of non-traditional casting. In the talk-back, which
customarily follows these staged reading events, a good bit of time was spent
on the credibility of a white man playing Nat Turner, especially before a crowd
who expected a black man and, whatever their reasons, were not so ready to
accept non-traditional casting in this instance.

But before it was over—in this
instance—they did. That was the consensus, and added to it was the fact,
surprising to some of them, that the playwright is a white woman.

There was a full Moon that evening,
culminating a holiday season of much sectarian and racial tension. But in the
lecture hall of The American Theatre there was a palpable relaxation of that
tension. Everyone was surprised, everyone turned on by an evening that started
out as a predictable disaster.

I don’t know what lesson to take
from it. But I can say for sure that I’m glad on that particular night I
happened to be in the right place at the right time.

This was a fascinating account of this challenge, to allow yourself, as an actor, to be "possessed" by such a powerful, disturbing, and charismatic historical character! I quite agree with you that casting actors for roles outside of their own ethnicity is a commendable enterprise, for it helps to break down barriers and enables us to see that we all have within us the same basic stuff--it encourages, that is, a kind of imaginative empathy, both for actor and audience. I hope to see a lot more of it. It would be interesting, for example, to do an August Wilson play with white or Asian actors--or, as Patrick Stewart recently did, stage an inverse Othello, where he played Othello against an all-black cast of Venetians. For some reason, the British seem much more open to such experimentation than we are here.